Sarah Gorham: Sarah Gorham

Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In âeoeMoving Horizontalâe a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in âeoeMarking Time in Door County,âe and in âeoeNeriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage,âe where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it (âeoePerfect Teaâe). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving (âeoeSentimental à la Carteâe). Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in âeoeDarling Amanitaâe lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: âeoeThe Shape of Fearâe relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed. Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection's exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

Bad Daughter explores misbehavior—its risky pleasures and often tragic consequences—through poems about “bad” daughters, sisters, and their mothers. What happens to the sister who obeys? What if a daughter refuses her inheritance? Can she? What sanctuary and what limits do worship and domesticity provide? Gorham adopts several lyric forms—‘morality tales,’ ironic prayers, scaled-down sonnets, sharp meditations on concepts such as envy, detachment, and immortality—to show that the self as forged by generations of women and girls is both subversive and enduring.

In The Cure, Sarah Gorham’s mature, eager, intelligent poetic voice explores family—and marriage; and self—as forms in which we move, escaping and demanding restraint, seeking and fearing contact with each other. The book moves toward and away from a riveting sequence, "The Family Afterward," that examines the intrusions and heartbreaks, complicities and narrowings of definition, that are forced upon the family members of an alcoholic. Gorham is interested in appetite: for drink, for sex, for oblivion, for comfort. The paradoxes she most thrillingly defines are the tightest ones, degrees and atmospheres apart. The Cure is both accessible and intimate; sometimes funny, sometimes desolate. Gorham describes a hike, the hiker coming upon a limestone cross, surrounded by the tchotchke-mementos of previous passers-by. She is flooded, but trusts the surprise of her emotion: "Very moving these rookie prayers/ This unmajestic gratitude." It’s that delectable sensibility, the pause that yields finely tuned appreciation, that marks Gorham’s vision, her cupped ear listening to the world.

Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow When we were good we were... Immortality Birthday Doppelgänger Prick and Twinge Electret High Tea Soakaway Salon Barbecue Ice Storm Passeggiata Scaffold for a Sonnet We Are Bold to Say Floaters The end of illness is the end of metaphor Our House Sixteen The Sacrifice After Pindar Accommodation Vague You Bother Me Envy Prayer during a Fast Red Mulberry Homesickness Floater Pounce Tin Drumming After the Accident Loose Thread Follow Sigh Detach Compost Bob White A Ha Ha Fence Pond in Winter Three Sides to the Mountain That Are Really One Juncture Lost Parting Prayer Dusk Floating City This or That On the Birth of a Daughter